Monday, June 08, 2015

I forgot a bunch of bananas this week so had need of my banana bread recipe and went back into the archive to retrieve it. Originally posted July 2010 it's definitely worth coming back to again and again.

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Remember all those bananas I bought at a bargain
price the other day. I've made six loaves of this bread from them since
then, using 18+ bananas and there are still bananas in the freezer and
all the fruits that were eaten by guests in the interim. Didn't we do
well?

This bread isn't a world shattering revelation of
a recipe but it's tremendously popular - which is just as well, really.
The method is simple and the basic bread would lend itself to all sorts
of innovative additions if you had a mind to it although the novelty of
the basic banana flavoured loaf hasn't worn off yet in this house.

It's also packed full of oats which render it positively healthy as a food. What are you waiting for - make it now!

Mix
together all the dry ingredients. The oats I've been using are jumbo
oats but Quaker porridge oats would also work. Don't use instant
porridge powder because I think it would be horrible.

100g of sugar is plenty in my opinion but you can bump it up to 125g if you have a sweet tooth.

Salt is always optional.

Baking
powder - people get so worked up about their raising agents. In France
levure chimique is sold in little sachets containing 11g. This is plenty
to raise this loaf. If you don't have a sachet, two flat teaspoons of
baking powder is sufficient. If you don't have baking powder then mix
together 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda (sodium bicarbonate) with 2
teaspoons of cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), use 2 teaspoons of
this in your loaf and throw the other one away! Simple, non?

In
another bowl mash the bananas until gloopy. Mr. Stripey likes to find
bits of actual banana in his bread and this is what the fourth banana is
for. Don't mash it, add it in little bits just before the batter goes
into the tin.

Add the milk (or water, nobody ever died
from using water instead of soy milk in banana bread) and oil to the
banana mush and stir together. Then add the whole lot to the dry
ingredients and mix well to combine. It should make a nice wet batter,
add a very little extra water if you feel the mix is too stiff.

I line my tin with a piece of baking paper, just the long sides and bottom but you can grease the tin if you prefer.

Put
the batter into the tin, rap the filled container on the work surface
to settle the mix and bake in a medium hot oven, about 180C for 50
minutes to an hour. I'm sorry that's a bit vague but the oven here isn't
exactly temperature controlled. Test your loaf after 50 minutes with a
skewer and if it comes out a bit wet with uncooked batter be prepared to
give it the full hour.

After cooking, allow to cool in
the tin for 10 minutes and then finish cooling on a rack. It doesn't
cut well warm but is nicest fresh from the oven. If you keep it in a
sealed container or plastic bag it will slice more cleanly on the second
day but the slices are still a bit crumbly. This hardly matters as
you'll need to break it into pieces to cram it into your mouth.

Served with apricot jam and banana icecream it's a pretty good pudding too.